Is progressive politics dead in California? Experts weigh in

OAKLAND, Calif. - Vice President Kamala Harris easily won her home state of California on election night, but results in local races and statewide show a shift to the political center. 

Ten counties in California turned red, where voters ended up helping to elect Republican President Donald Trump. More than 40% of Californians voted for him over Harris. Trump won the most votes for a GOP presidential candidate in California since 2004. 

California voters passed Prop. 36, which increases penalties for retail theft and drug trafficking, and they voted down Proposition 6, which would have paid people in prison for their labor and abolished slavery in any form.  

In the San Francisco Bay Area, voters ousted the progressive-minded Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price. Democratic socialist San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston lost his race. 

In Los Angeles, DA George Gascón was ousted by Nathan Hochman, a candidate who promised he would be a more law-and-order district attorney.

This Election Day shows that political tides have changed a lot in the Golden State in the last four years, when California was at the forefront of a national reckoning of racial injustices and a move toward a robust criminal justice reform movement with the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer. 

But as of last Tuesday, those left-ist sentiments seem to have vanished – at least for now.

On Monday, KTVU spoke to University of California at Santa Cruz history professor Nolan Higdon; Vinod Aggarwal, a distinguished political science professor and Alann P. Bedford Endowed chair at UC Berkeley, Saint Mary's College of California Provost Corey Cook, who is also a political science professor, and KTVU Political Analyst Brian Sobel. 

Here are their takes: 

Is progressive politics dead in California?

It depends on who you ask. 

"I would say progressive politics is probably going to be dead among the Democratic Party in the state of California in the short term," Higdon said. "I think they're going to try and do some soul-searching and find some issues that attract voters and don't alienate them." 

The most compelling reason, Higdon said, is that even in the liberal Bay Area, many voters have come to conclude that lighter penalties are responsible for the current crime wave – despite conflicting studies on whether this is true. 

Aggarwal was even more blunt about it.

"It's almost dying," he said. "I would say it's on life support." 

Aggarwal said that most California voters are moderate – even though the liberal activists get the most attention – and he's not surprised at the backlash.

He reiterated what Higdon said – that most residents care about crime – and added that the rest of the issues voters care about are schools and the economy. 

But as for Cook, he's still holding out hope for the progressives. 

"No, absolutely not," he said. "Progressive politics is far from dead. But everybody's in the doom loop right now." 

Cook agreed with the other experts, however, that the economy was the main sticking point and Democrats didn't govern in a way to help the working class enough and that's essentially what did them in. 

"It was a mandate to move more to the center to take more care around how we're dealing with crime, homelessness and other things. It's clear Californians, and San Franciscans and others, really have come to their wits' end as to what they're seeing on the streets," said Sobel.  

He said voters were willing to back new candidates who promised change. 

"Incumbents did okay, they did not do overwhelmingly outstanding," he said. "San Francisco... is very progressive, and it's not going to change, but what they wanted was some changes in the approach to some of these problems the city is dealing with."
 

Why did so many California counties turn red? 

California is going through a difficult economic time, experts pointed out, plus the state has a housing crisis and serious commuting issues.

"It's really difficult to blame Republicans for any of those outcomes," Higdon said. "And so, I think you're starting to see that these 10 counties in particular are starting to explore different politics. Some are asking, ‘What is this Trump thing?’ ‘What is this conservative thing?’ If this is what the Democrats are doing, maybe there is something better."

Higdon said he's not necessarily confident that people have faith in Trump's rhetoric or even like it.

But he did say that he thinks "a lot of people are desperate and just testing out alternatives."  

Aggarwal agreed that most of California is centrist and that if politicians "only play to the left" they're going to face repercussions.

In his opinion, Aggarwal said he didn't think Democrats delivered on their promises. 

"So am I surprised?" Aggarwal asked. "Not at all." 

What about George Floyd? 

The Black Lives Matter movement started a decade before George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, fueling a movement that pushed progressive politicians, like in Oakland and Los Angeles, into power.

It's true that more people were home on their screens focusing on racial injustice at that time, Higdon said, but at the same time, people were isolated and not really engaging in person with political opponents.

"A lot of people during COVID, not just progressives, but all around the ideological spectrum, became a lot more confident," Higdon said, "and hardened in their views. And so, at least here in a place like California, a lot of those progressive policies came to fruition and ultimately, voters came to turn against them." 

Cook also pointed out that California has always been a "deeply anti-tax" state, and that criminal justice reform was always a matter of how to save money.

Where did the Democrats go wrong? 

In Cook's opinion, the Democrats should be asking themselves how to better govern the people they say they care about. 

"The question is what does it mean to govern as a progressive?" Cook asked. "To me, it's not that the progressive path of politics is dead or that progressive policies have been repudiated. It's that I frankly don't think the Democrats are governing like progressives. But they're campaigning like them."

Cook said Bernie Sanders had it right all along: "The primal scream in the election was when unions were not endorsing the Democratic ticket."

Also, Cook said he believes the Democrats have become disconnected from the working-class base. 

"I don't think the Democrats have been particularly progressive on health care or economic issues," he said. "I think they've been very progressive on social issues." 

Do politics always swing back and forth? 

The political pendulum always swings back and forth, Higdon said, adding that usually, there's a 40-year liberal period followed by a 40-year conservative period. 

Right now, Trump and the Republicans have a lot to celebrate with their wins in the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court.

But as Higdon asked: How long will that last?

President Barack Obama had a smashing victory in 2008, but in the end, Higdon said that the "story of his presidency was losing 1,000 seats for the Democratic Party… and sending some of his own voters over to the Trump campaign in 2016. 

"And even though it may seem right now like the Democrats are in the political wilderness after the trouncing, these things bounce back quite quickly," Higdon said. 

Is this pendulum good for political health? 

Aggarwal thinks that the swinging pendulum is good for California's political health.

"I think the fact is that we've had Democrats in power in California for a very long time," he said. 

He pointed to San Francisco as his case in point.

"People say that this is an example where there's no significant opposition from Republicans," Aggarwal said. "You can basically do whatever you want [if you're a progressive.] And look at what you've done. You've made a mess of it." 

He said that the moderates, centrists and even those on the right are probably saying "it's time to throw those rascals out." 

Higdon disagreed, in part, saying that his biggest gripe is with the two-party political system in the first place. 

"I mean, there's nothing good for the United States or any country when we only have two parties for a nation of 334 million people," Higdon said. "But the idea of diversity of choice is critically important."